Lego Day at the Library

Over winter break, we hosted a very popular event at my library: Lego Day! After our successful Elephant and Piggie Day last summer, we wanted to do a similar passive-ish program for winter break and we decided to take the plunge and start Lego programming.

What we did:

Lego Day was held Friday, January 4 (the last Friday of winter break) from 10am-4pm. It was a drop-in event, no registration required, and we had various stations set up around our Children’s Room. Our activities included:

Photo by Abby Johnson, NAFCPL

A Lego creation room (of course!). We set up tables in our programming room and left out Legos for kids and families to build with. We included Legos, Duplos, and Mega Bloks for the very youngest.

Photo by Abby Johnson, NAFCPL

Craft stations. We had a table where kids could make a Lego mask and a table where kids could make a Lego stick puppet. For each of these tables, we put out the templates, crayons, glue, and craft sticks and let families go to town.

Photo by Abby Johnson, NAFCPL

When Miss T ran off the templates, she printed the instructions right on the papers, which was a great idea!

Photo by Abby Johnson, NAFCPL

Lego Ski-ball. We set out a basket of Lego Duplos for the kids to throw.

Photo by Abby Johnson, NAFCPL

A Lego matching memory game. We put this out on one of our tables for families to play with.

And a couple others I don’t have pictures of: Lego coloring sheets and a dress-up station (ostensibly “Dress up like a Lego character!” but really the kids just love to dress up!).

Lego Day was a really fun day and families had a great time at the library. Many kids and parents were very excited to see something related to Legos on our library calendar and we also had a nice turnout for our Saturday Lego Club (we had the inaugural meeting in January and plan to offer it every month!). We had over 50 people show up, which is HUGE for a Saturday program here.

The blog Walking by the Way has some great printable Learning with Lego resources that would be fun for stations or for a take-home packet.

Lego Duplo has partnered with ALSC to offer a program called Read, Build, Play. You will find resources on their website including activities for young children and information for parents (and librarians!) on the importance of play and reading.

We provided the Legos for our creation room and now we’re using them for a monthly Lego Club that’s bringing many families into the library. To start our collection, we used points from the Campbell Soup Labels for Education program. We have a volunteer who maintains our donated labels and we hadn’t used any points in quite awhile, so we were able to get a good start. We also purchased additional basic Lego, Duplo, and Mega Blok sets with some of our programming money. We plan to put out the call for donations now that we’ve got our Lego Club established and I’m hoping that many of our patrons have Lego sets collecting dust in attics and basements!

Have you hosted a Lego Club or Lego programming at your library? How did it go?

6 Responses to Lego Day at the Library

Sounds like a great program, with lots of ways for the kids to extend the play–with the masks, the dressing up, etc. Playmobiles are also very fun and have endless possibilities for imaginative play. Thanks for sharing all the resources, Abby!

Lego programs have been incredibly successful at our branch. We do a 4 week program, once a week in the evening. We register 25 children from ages 6-12 and there is always a waiting list. Aside from building with the Lego, we offer weekly challenges, Lego Bingo, and the craft activities listed above.
It’s one of our most popular and requested programs for school-agers. Getting Lego has been a challenge,(so pricey) it always seems like we could use more:)

Be careful using “lego” in the description, etc. At our library we have had to change them to building bricks parties, because apparently Lego is cracking down on people using their name on programs that they have not sponsered or specifically endorsed. That being said, it looks like a great program!!!

We did a lego program last summer called Builders of the Future. It was so much fun and we had infants to middle schoolers attend. Parents brought the whole family which was nice. We plan to do it again this summer. I love the ideas you posted and may add a few! Thanks!